Albert Einstein, Objective Reality, and Randomness

"No one knows anything. The whole affair would have been a delight to Jesuit fathers."
—Albert Einstein on the first international meeting on quantum physics, Solvay, 1911

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is famous for many things. Mostly, now, he is remembered as the genius who changed scientists' (and other educated peoples') view of the nature of space and time through his theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity.

The second most famous thing about Einstein is that he showed this genius later in life. It is common knowledge that he did poorly in school as a child. This story is beloved by parents who feel their child's self-esteem is more important than actually hitting the books and proving they have done it with good grades. Unfortunately the story is not true. Little Albert's grades were quite good from elementary school to graduate school. [The best Einstein biography for advanced readers, including Philosophy students, is Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein]

The third most famous thing about him was his support for the U.S.A. developing an atomic weapon, followed by his regret that an atomic weapon was developed and used to destroy two cities filled with people in Japan. Albert was a peace activist well before World War I began, and remained so until the end of his life.

Albert Einstein was interested in philosophy from at least as early as his college days. Possibly the fourth most famous thing he was famous for was not being able to reconcile with the science of quantum physics, even though he was one of the inventors and major contributors to that branch of science.

Quantum physics developed slowly. Its origin is usually marked by Max Plank's paper on radiation in 1901, which to jump to a later interpretation said that electromagnetic radiation (including light) comes in energy packages, or quanta. This went along with the ongoing development of the atomic theory, which had shown that electric charge also came in packages, which came to be called electrons. There were many weird things about the new theory, most notably that these light quanta, or photons, and electrons sometimes acted like waves and sometimes acted like particles.

The parts of quantum theory that Einstein could never except had to do with randomness. Einstein wanted to see reality as objective. That does not mean that it is just made up of objects. Rather, he wanted the objects (which could include wave-like objects) to be subject to the laws of causality, as he saw them. A number of results of quantum physics collided with Einstein's view of causality, including the Uncertainty Principle [Heisenberg's] and such random events as the decays of nuclear physics (resulting in radioactivity) and in particular the random timing of transitions of electrons when near an atom that result in electromagnetic radiation.

Younger physicists had no problem accepting quantum physics. They seldom saw it as posing a philosophical problem, much less a science one. Einstein's assumption that to have science you need causality, and specifically causality as defined by Isaac Newton, does not hold much weight today among people with PhD's in physics.

Einstein worked until he was on his death bed to find the underlying causes of quantum randomness and probabilities. Long after his death it was postulated, and is now generally believed, that the proton and neutron consist of smaller entities called quarks (more particle like) and gluons (more wave or force-like). If there were some way to measure the positions and velocities of the particles making up the neutrons and protons of an atom, then perhaps it would be possible to predict when a specific atom of a radioactive element would decay. But it is not likely that these decays are the result of the quarks reaching some particular configuration.

Consider dice and solar flares.

Ordinary fair dice, the kind used in casinos and board games, are governed by classical physics. [If you could make them small enough, say a few atoms across, they might start to display true quantum randomness.] They produces random results as long as they are thrown fairly. In theory (and to a surprising degree in practice) you can predict the results if you can sufficiently control how they are thrown and know enough about the surfaces they bounce against before coming up snake eyes, or boxcars, or whatever.

Einstein wanted atomic physics to work like ordinary dice. That would preserve his classical physics version of causality.

Consider solar flares. Scientist know there are patterns to them, but within the envelopes of those patterns they are random. They are mainly classical physics phenomena. They would be predictable if you knew enough about the matter and energy of the sun that gives rise to them. But how would you know that, in advance? You would need some sort of probe that can survive within the sun and send you detailed information about the pre-flare setup.

In fact there are a lot of things we can't know with certainty, for a wide variety of reasons. That does not mean that reality isn't objective. It is because objective reality is complicated. Very to the power of 30 complicated.

For much of my life I tended to favor Einstein's objections to quantum randomness. At some point, however, I realized the problem was more semantic than scientific. In other words, the problem was with how Einstein defined the words objective and causality.

Randomness in quantum physics doe not mean that anything can happen. The randomness in quantum physics is in envelopes. Just as when you roll a pair of dice you may bet any result from 2 to 12, but get 7's more often than other results, in quantum physics you mostly individual get results around a central number, and statistical results from a large set of data are also typically very close to that number.

That is causal enough for me. I accept probability and the statistical nature of results as part of the objective reality of the universe. In fact I have found that seeing the relationship of randomness to cause and effect has been very helpful to me.

I could tell you a story about a preacher who always introduced himself to potential victims with the words "Look around you. Do you believe that this all could be random?" But I have covered enough for one essay.

Wittgenstein, Determinism, and Probability

One of the oldest philosophical questions is whether the Universe is deterministic or indeterministic. In a strictly deterministic universe everything that happens unfolds, causally, from the previous configuration of the universe. In such a universe, the thinking typically goes, man has no Free Will. We do what we are compelled to do by the rules of the Universe, or by the gods, if you prefer religious terminology. Our lives are controlled by Fate.

The advent of quantum physics threw a monkey wrench into the deterministic view of the universe constructed by scientists between 1600 and 1900. After considerable debate and experimentation, quantum physicists decided that at least some things in the universe happened by chance. This gave strength to the Free Will schools of philosophy and religion.

As far as I know my favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, did not decree the universe to be deterministic, or indeterministic either. Wittgenstein was a philosopher's philosopher. He offered no direct guidance to living life, unlike say Friedrich Nietzsche or Henry David Thoreau. In fact it is hard to find a place where he said anything definite about the universe, at least not after his earliest work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

In his later works, including Philosophical Investigations, you might say that Wittgenstein deconstructs philosophy. But he is not a nihilist. For Wittgenstein the universe exists, it is no illusion. Instead what gives the aura of illusion to much philosophy, religion, and magical thinking is a swarm of errors that result from careless reasoning and the inexact nature of English and the other languages we use to do our thinking.

So what can best be learned from Wittgenstein is a technique, a critical attitude. It is similar to the ancient Socratic method of asking questions that lead a student to a correct, if complex, viewpoint. The trick to the Socratic method is asking the correct questions. I've never seen a formula for generating the correct questions. Wittgenstein provides no explicit formula, but his later works provide large numbers of examples of trying to apply an analytic (but often intuitive) process to philosophy itself. Frequently we are led to conclude that philosophy, like religion, is riddled with nonsense. Eliminating nonsense is one Herculean task that must be done if you want a clean stable for your ideas about the world.

Based on looking at many human and natural phenomena, we don't need to abandon the terms deterministic and indeterministic. What we have to do is use them more carefully and to realize that in certain situations there are shades of gray between them, and even room for both to be present in the same phenomena.

One of the most interesting and well-examined domains is probabilistic phenomena. We can speak of the probabilities of drawing an inside straight in poker, of an atom of radium decaying within the next pico second, of fog in the morning in London in February, or of Aunt Betty calling unexpectedly. But probability is another big word that may be misleading if we over generalize. Does shuffling a deck of cards create the same sort of probability as weather or quantum uncertainty?

Probability can exist in both a determinate world and an indeterminate world. From Newton's time until Heisenberg every throw of the dice was believed by scientists to be subject to the laws of (what we now call) classical physics, laws that were totally deterministic. Sure, with 2 dice, snake eyes came up every so often, and seven came up a reliable percentage of the time, but that was because humans had devised this method to introduce randomness. The dice were supposed to be shook up or thrown hard, making slight variations in muscle movements, too small to consciously control, result in outcomes that the thrower could not predict. A man of skill, throwing carefully, might cause dice to produce specified results at least some of the time, but other men monitored such cheating. The end result, fair or cheat, was determined by the placement of the dice in space, the momentum of the throw (including angular momentum), the exact characteristics of their bounces, and even the friction of the air.

When quantum physicists first discovered random atomic events many thought that there would prove to be underlying non-random, deterministic events that could explain the randomness. Much like Newtonian physics could explain, at least in theory, any particular throw of the dice. Einstein, for instance, believed that. But they were wrong, as far as anyone can tell. Many atomic and subatomic events do follow classical physics. Momentum, for instance, is preserved in atomic collisions. But decay processes, including radioactive decay and the emission of a light quanta by an electron "falling" from a high energy "orbit" to a lower energy orbit seem to be random events. At least within an envelope.

An envelope? They always leave that factoid out when religious gurus who specialize in the mechanics of separating their followers from money are elevating Quantum Physics to a Recipe for Mysticism. An envelope, here, is a metaphor for bounded probabilities. For instance, no matter how many times you role a pair of dice, the results are limited to the numbers between 2 and 12. That in itself is a kind of fuzzy determinism. Casinos, the old-fashioned kind with roulette wheels and people dealing cards, were built of fuzzy determinism. You could not predict which gamblers would win or lose any given hand or turn of the wheel, but at the end of the night the casino had more money than it started with.

Likewise a radioactive atom. You can't know when a particular atom will decay, but you can bet on a large group of atoms of the same element and not lose your shirt because the group emits radiation at a very predictable rate.

Once you start putting atoms together you quickly reach a point where quantum physics becomes pointless and you might as well fall back on classical physics. Yet engineers can build machines that make use of quantum mechanics for devices humans use, as shown by almost every electronic device made since the invention of the transistor. We use quantum uncertainty in our devices, yet we do that to increase predictable, deterministic behavior. If our devices get a glitch, the most likely sources are not quantum mechanical fluctuations outside the expected envelope but the failure of old classical components like a battery or solder joint.

So be careful about philosophical extrapolation. Or remember the modern key to all knowledge and wisdom: It's Complicated. You are made up of the same stuff of the rest of the universe, the arrangement is just different. We are arranged like mammals, only more so. Thinking about Free Will or Not Free Will will not help you make a decision. So take a deep breath and know that causality and randomness, determinism and indeterminism, are both going on all the time, within you and without you.

This essay is offered as a sacrifice to the Roman goddess Fortuna, and to the lucky Roman soldiers who won Jesus Christ's clothes at the crucifixion.

More quantum physics and philosophy

Entangled in Spooky Science

Spooky science sells better than serious science, especially when science requires mathematics beyond 99% of the population's knowledge. The June 2011 Scientific American issue includes an article by Vlatko Vedral, Living in a Quantum World, that emphasizes one spooky corner of reality, quantum entanglement. This is also a favorite topic of New Age purveyors of spooky religious viewpoints, as if it might provide a physical basis for ESP and other tricks of the trade.

We are spooked by the unfamiliar. Familiar things that should be totally amazing, like transistor radios and lasers, which rely on quantum mechanical effects, don't faze us at all these days. We don't have to understand new technologies to stop being spooked by them, we just need to see them in action for a while.

I would argue that quantum physics has few new philosophical implications. It is no where near as revolutionary as what we now call Classical physics.

Classic is one of those words we need to be careful about. It used to allude to the culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, let's say from 500 B.C. to before the Christ cult took over in the 4th century after Augustus Caesar. In physics it means, roughly, how the world was conceived of by scientists from the era of Galileo and Copernicus until Albert Einstein's four famous papers of 1905.

Classical physics was pretty darned spooky stuff. Not really believable, unless you looked at nature with a great deal of care. Before classical physics there was ordinary human intuition based on experiences in the world, and there was the physics of Aristotle and his cohort of Greek geeks. Today seven year olds know about dinosaurs and galaxies, but no one knew about them in 1400. Except for a very few people who studied the Greek classics (and the equivalents of other civilizations, notably the Arabs, Indians and Chinese), experience was limited. Water flowed downhill, the seasons were reliable, the stars rotated around Polaris, and no one had built a decent sewer system since the fall of the Roman Empire.

For Aristotle objects moved only when under the influence of a continuous force. People familiar with Newton's first law of motion (previously stated by many others, especially Islamic scientists), that an object's velocity remains constant unless acted on by an external force, may laugh at Aristotle. But in the everyday real-world Aristotle is right and Newton is wrong. Aristotle correctly believed there is always friction; he argued that vacuums, required for friction-free maintenance of velocity, cannot exist. The best modern car running on a flat road need gas, and the force from its engine, to maintain a constant speed to overcome friction. For Newton's version of the law to work you need essentially imaginary conditions: a perfect vacuum, which you can't find even in inter-galactic space.

The idea of continuing motion without a force behind it was spooky; it still is if you think about it too much. But it was not as spooky as the revelation that the earth revolves on its axis. We seem to be relatively motionless, hugging mother earth, but we are not.

Electricity and magnetism are part of pre-1905 physics. Talk about spooky. Both were believed by religious types to be the physical basis for ESP and hypnotism (called personal magnetism). Both exerted force at a distance. It took decades of experimenting and thinking to figure out their basic laws. But people got used to them. They got used to the telegraph, electric lights, and telephones.

Other people, including scientists, had trouble with Albert Einstein's work on relativity. Einstein himself had lots of trouble with the concepts of quantum physics, even though he was one of the inventors of the inventors of the field. He called quantum entanglement "spooky action at a distance." This from a guy whose father and uncle had a successful 19th-century electromagnetics business. (Which is why doing well in elementary school was not all that important to his future success.)

Context is as important in the natural sciences as it is in philosophy or dealing with various human cultures. Vedral's "Living in a Quantum World," makes the case that quantum effects can show up in our macro world. In particular he wrote about quantum entanglement. It is interesting stuff, and I applaud those who have figured out how to extend our knowledge of this subtle phenomena. But be forewarned, this is the stuff New Age con artists use to bamboozle their soft-brained victims.

Beware of physics writers over generalizing. Vedral uses the phrase "Quantum mechanics says ..." Quantum mechanics does not say anything. Physicists say things, and they often disagree with each other, especially about quantum mechanics and its philosophical interpretations. As a group they like to say that quantum mechanics has a long history of making correct predictions as verified by experiments. But in fact, as illustrated in, for instance, Abraham Pais's Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, quantum mechanics has a long history of missing on as many predictions as it hit. Today's quantum mechanics is not the quantum mechanics of 1940. The math has often been fudged after the experimental results were known. That is fine, fixing a theory is part of the process of science.

It does not serve science, however, to pretend that a theory developed in the 1920's accurately predicted all the results known today.

Not So Much Uncertainty

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or less pretentiously, the uncertainty relationship, is a fact of nature, discovered as part of quantum mechanics (a subset of the more general quantum physics).

Philosophies and religions that believe in an observer-created reality have interpreted the uncertainty relationship as proof of their viewpoint. They claim that reality is subjective, not objective, and this supports or interweaves with other aspects of their viewpoint. Some, but not all, New Age and Eastern (Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism) religious sects propose that human individuals "create their own world," and that by learning to control their minds can thereby control the world. They may also claim that the world is an illusion, thus justifying not paying attention to it, or basing decisions on faith in religious leaders or scriptures.

These claims warrant examination.

The uncertainty relationship was discovered in 1927, capping a four year period of rapid discoveries in quantum physics which solved problems that had been on the table for decades. It is fair to say that the discovery of the electron (1897), or minimal unit of electric charge, and of the light quanta, or photon in 1905, had started what we now call quantum physics. But in 1923, even though it was believed that electrons associated with atoms obeyed quantum laws, no one could correctly model the spectra (specific frequencies of light) emitted by heated molecules of differing elements.

In September of 1923 Louis de Broglie proposed that electron, like the photon, obeyed the law associating a frequency with its energy level. Energy (E) would equal frequency (f) times Planck's constant h:

E = f x h

In fact he proposed that all forms of matter and energy were governed by that relationship, and thus had a wave property, frequency, associated with them.

Much happened in 1924, but in 1925 Werner Heisenberg cracked the basic math for the frequency of atomic spectra problem. He decided he would use no model of atoms at all, but would instead base his Quantum Mechanics only on observable facts, in the first instance, the frequencies of light emitted by atoms. With considerable help from friends (Born, Jordan, and Pauli), and because all the spectral data had been available for decades, the new system was shown to be essentially correct. In addition Erwin Schrodinger in January 1926 solved the hydrogen spectrum with his wave formulation of quantum mechanics. Physics guys liked that because the math was more familiar to them than Heisenberg's, but soon the two maths were shown to be equivalent.

Max Born issued his first paper on the probability interpretation of quantum mechanics in June of 1926, which is of great philosophical importance, but which won't be followed in this essay. In March of 1927 physical experiments first showed that de Broglie was absolutely right: electrons, thought of as particles, did have frequencies and acted like waves in certain situations.

Which brings us back to Heisenberg, and March 23, 1927. His uncertainty relationship was based on the nature of the math used in quantum mechanics to correctly predict spectra, and on a thought experiment (later carried out with real experimental apparatus). It is important to understand the equation:



The "p" represents momentum, "x" can be taken as the location in space, and the triangles in this case indicate the latitude or slack available for their attached variables. The total slack, or uncertainty, from multiplying the observed momentum with the observed locations in space is greater than or equal to Planck's constant (h) divided by 2 times pi (3.14), or about h/6. The best case scenario for accuracy is when the two sides of the equation are equal.

Which is to day if you have really great experimental apparatus and are trying to simultaneously measure something's momentum and position in space, the best you can do overall is get it to within about h/6. If you try to make p smaller (more accurate or certain), x becomes less accurate or certain. If you double the certainty of p, you halve the certainty of x.

Yet on this uncertainty whole philosophies and religions try to defend their metaphysical speculations from the discipline of nature. How much uncertainty are we talking about?

Planck's constant is an experimentally determined number of energy units multiplied by time. Given that our everyday science energy units are on our scale, it is a small number: about 6.626 times ten to the negative 34th Joule seconds. In other words, put down a decimal point, then 33 zeros, then 6626:

.00000000000000000000000000000006626 Joule seconds

You probably have no more sense of how small atomic particles are than I do, but the result is that uncertainty is pretty significant for a light quanta, roughly corresponding to its wave length, and is significant for a single electron. However, it really is not all that significant, most of the time, even for something as light as a hydrogen atom (one proton with one electron). The uncertainty is for the entire experimental system; it does not increase as we work on objects of larger mass.

Upscale to something we think of as really small, say a virus particle, and the uncertainty is still about h/6, which means that determining the momentum and position of our virus is going to be limited by our experimental apparatus and our lack of caring, rather than by the uncertainty relationship.

So how certain were scientists about positions real world things before Heisenberg? The answer is no one had really thought about it clearly. Quick, give me the exact position and momentum of that cloud in the sky over there. See, classical physics was filled with uncertainty, just as life is. But arguing the cloud is not real because you can't tell me to 99 decimals where its center of mass is right now, is foolish. In theory in classical physics the moon has an exact position in space and an exact momentum, but no one was ever able to measure the moon or for that matter anything that would have caused their experiments to be affected by Heisenberg's certainty limitations.

Heisenberg found the uncertainty principle because it finally mattered to scientists. Things that matter in the quantum world of electrons and photons may not matter in our gigantic human everyday scale. The rules of quantum physics apply only to very, very, very small things. In aggregate they average out to ordinary, everyday physics and to our intuitive understanding of dealing with our everyday lives.

What Heisenberg really showed is that we can be highly certain about physical reality if we are willing to put in the effort. Even in the case of electrons.

If you are a carpenter, and are used to your hammer, you know how to hit a nail on the head. There is plenty of uncertainty at a human scale, but its nature is different.

Understand this, and you are probably ready to understand the issue of observation affecting what is observed in the domain of quantum physics. That will be a separate essay.

Key take away: uncertainty is a fact of nature, but in the sense of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it is very, very small.

[special thanks to Abraham Pais for Inward Bound
, pages 252-262 and those who have contributed to Wikipedia articles on quantum physics]

Natural Liberation Philosophy

Lazy Nature, Lazy God

Is nature lazy? It certainly is slow. Look how long it took for life as we know it to evolve.

The ancient Greek philosopher-scientists knew that light was lazy. They showed that when light is reflected from a surface the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. Whatever the speed of light was, this reflection rule resulted in the shortest, and therefore the fastest, path between a source of light, an observer, and a reflective surface between them. Light takes the shortest path.

In the era historians refer to as the Enlightenment, this came to be called the principle of least action.

Nature has a number of definitions; when I write Nature, I mean the Universe or totality of things, including the principles that cause it to exist and determine the specifics of existence. Primitive people take the ancient idea of a god (tree, rock, ghost, or human) and try to amplify that up until they have a God that created and rules over, or at least within, Nature. Whether you believe in God or Nature, the physics experiments come out the same.

So the principle of least action implies that God is lazy too. God's laziness makes the universe predictable.

You can make a lot out of this simple principle, which applies to solid physical objects as well a light and energy fields. To understand this, unfortunately, the path of least effort leads through the quicksand of something called the calculus of variations. And of course, most people in the world need to start working or fighting or begging before they even get to regular calculus in school. On the other hand, if you do happen to study calculus and then the calculus of variations, you can get anything you want in the world. You will be able to see deeper and further than other humans, and make of it what you will.

With your math magic, you are now ready to do Lagrangian dynamics, among other things. You can see where Newton's Laws come from: a lazy, symmetrical universe (designed by a lazy God). And using only the principle of laziness, you can work out Schrodinger's equation (for the motion of a non-relativistic particle in a potential field) [Byron & Fuller, Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics, p. 71]. Thus you have the key to quantum physics. In retrospect it is surprising no one came up with it before Erwin Schrodinger.

Which brings up another important point: Chance. Or probability, if you like the more modern formalism. Many Romans worshipped Chance, or Fortuna (Tyche to the Greeks). In addition to the chance events of human lives, the practice of gambling was already well-developed. Dice pre-exist recorded history, as did other methods of casting lots or determining oracles. The minor Christian god Jesus Christ may have been an incarnation of chance, as it was written in the Bible (King James translation), Mark 15:24, "And when they had crucified him, they parted his garments, casting lots upon them, what every man should take." [Alternate versions found in Matthew 27:25, where this is attributed to fulfilling a Jewish prophecy; Luke 23:34; and John 23:24]

The role of probability in quantum physics, and in particular the Uncertainty Theorem, has led to a lot of guru-driven nonsense spouted in the popular arena of wishful thinking. There is probability in quantum physics, which is to say in Nature, but it is of a type. We say things like "the probability of finding an electron within this space-time region in our experiment is 40%." It sounds like "there is a 40% chance of rain today." But if an experiment where the equations create a 40% expectation is run a few hundred times and the electron is only found 37% of the time, what physicists do is alter their equations. Afterwards it looks like they got the 37% figure from theory, but in fact they got it from practice and molded their theory to their results. See Inward Bound by Abraham Pais for numerous historical examples.

Asking where an electron is in space-time relative to an atomic nucleus is actually simply asking a bad question, although strangely it is fine to ask where the same electron is traversing a vacuum tube. Chance in quantum land is probably best seen in radioactive decay, where it is clearly a result of a probabilistic decay mechanism, not of observational or prediction problems.

The principle of least action leads to quantum probability equations. So in some sense the rules of probability in quantum phyics are themselves predictable. Just as we cannot be sure what any throw of the dice may bring, but we can predict the outcome of large numbers of throws using the rules of probability.

In classical physics, laziness appears to be exact (assuming you know exactly everything about your system), or too pick an exact shortest path. In quantum physics the mask of exactness is removed, but the laziness of Nature is still the rule.

Book references:

Randomness, Chance, and Two Darwins

We have the usual missionary cult groups in rural Mendocino County, California, near Point Arena: Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. In general they seem to be pretty nice people. I don't mind them visiting their neighbors. They'll talk if you want to talk, and go away politely if you don't want to talk. It is interesting to see their opening talk lines.

A few month's ago Paul (not his real name), an earnest young man (younger than me, anyway, no big feat these days) from one of these groups, asked me, "You don't believe all of this is due to chance, do you?" His sweeping arms indicated my bishop pines, eucalyptus, the people present, the sky and the universe.

"Yes, I do," I said. That threw him. He acted as if they forgot to put that in the recruitment play book. We talked a bit more, and they left (they always seem to come in pairs, which is good, because you can offer them a beer and they'll say No).

Yesterday I read about the difference between the randomness of classical physics and the randomness of quantum physics in Inward Bound by Abraham Pais. It reminded me of how much trouble I have had accepting the nature of reality at the quantum level, of how most people are even more confused by randomness than I am, and the conversation with the earnest Christian.

I knew Paul was referring to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. No, for things to be as snafu as they are in this world, you need a Central Planning Intelligence, a sort of cosmic CIA, God's designer intervention team.

Because even trained scientists have difficulty with issues of causation and randomness, you can bet (or lay odds) that religious recruiters are going to use people's confusion to lay out their own highly improbably, but very simple, causal story: God created things (and he speaks directly to the leaders of my religion, the only true religion).

Natural liberation involves understanding nature's randomness and causality. That means understanding their respective roles in the world. You need to remind yourself some times that words like chance, randomness, planning, and causality are used by humans to lump together a wide variety of natural phenomena.

It is said that some Roman soldiers worshipped Chance (Fortuna) as a god. Plato, on the other hand, did not like randomness, and preferred unseen causes to explain the otherwise inexplicable world. There are also the related ancient ideas of Fate and Free Will. Some people don't like causality because it seems to take away free will, but most people accept some causality in the "outside" world while reserving free will for people's decision making process.

A lot of this is illuminated by understanding the difference between the randomness of genetics and evolution, the randomness of classical physics, and the randomness of quantum physics.

Classical physical randomness is the best starting point. Think about dice or better still, a card game. The cards in poker are supposed to be dealt randomly, and for practical purposes we don't think about that when playing poker unless we think the dealer is cheating. But we know that each physical card maintains its physical identity from hand to hand; shuffling cards is a causal process that gives the card order a sort of practical randomness.

The classical physics problem that is solved with this sort of randomness is calculating the energy, specific heat or temperature of some matter. It is easiest with certain "ideal" gasses (ideal because the theory works out!). In classical physics everything is causal. The gas molecules all have locations, masses, and velocities. They bounce off each other in a causal manner similar to colliding marbles. But there are two many of them to use ordinary calculus to keep track of, much less calculate the temperature. By treating the molecules as having random velocities and directions, scientists could group them. The properties of the groups, fit into the right equations, give good answers. Even then this is complicated enough that scientists (notably Ludwig Boltzmann) did not get this essentially right until the late 1800's.

The point to be noticed is that in classical physics, there is no inherent randomness in matter or energy. Randomness is at the macro level, or the level of human perception. It arises out of microscopic events that are too difficult for us to keep track of. When we roll dice, they obey all of Newton's laws of physics, we just can't keep track. Nature, presumably, does keep track.

Charles Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection is covered under this classical randomness theory. Darwin did not know about chromosomes or DNA. We now know that the DNA of two parents is randomly mixed and selected for each child. This is an example of classical physical randomness: causal laws are at work on the cell level, but we can't follow them, we can only see the results. Survival until reproduction of the next generation involves both events that we classify as causal (quicker, and so escaped a predator) and random (standing in wrong place, wiped out by a flood).

I knew I was technically wrong to say, to Paul that I believe "all this" was a result of chance. There is chance involved, but evolution is really best described as causal. Its randomness is classical, a matter of humans using statistics to describe complex large scale events that are causal at a microscopic letter.

A second scientist Darwin (or fourth, if you want to include Erasmus Darwin and George Howard Darwin), Charles Galton Darwin, a grandson of Charles, was one of the many scientists who contributed to the creation of quantum physics. Coincidence, or caused by his high level of intelligence, education, and a family tradition of breaking new ground?

In quantum physics, very early on, it appeared there were truly random processes in nature. Radioactivity was the first example. Atoms of radioactive elements appear to decay randomly. So of course all the bright guys of the era set out to show that there were underlying causes for the decays. That would have set their classical physics world to right. But they could not find any underlying, classical mechanism for the randomness. In the 1920's some younger physicists started accepting this quantum randomness as just inherent in the universe. Today there is still no causal theory that explains quantum randomness. It is an simply a human observation about nature at the quantum level.

The philosophic and religious interpretations of this facet of natural reality tend to simply be used to reinforce prior prejudices. Some say quantum randomness proves there is free will. Some say it means there must be a multiverse. Many project the randomness into scales well beyond quantum physics. In fact, randomness averages out very quickly, even quantum randomness. Put a few atoms together in a molecule, and quantum randomness tones way down. By the time you have anything worth worrying about, say a few hundred molecules of gold in a lump, quantum randomness has no effect on causality. Classical physics works better.

Scientists and technicians have produce clever ways to bring quantum randomness into the world of objects that humans can see, but this is an engineering trick. Electronics parts may use quantum randomness (as in quantum tunneling), but they are themselves very predictable.

It takes a lot of study to gain even a basic understanding of quantum physics. Even the Bible is an easier read than an introduction to quantum physics text book, not to mention the mathematical prerequisites required to comprehend the equations in it. Pop quantum physics is about as useful as Bible quotes taken out of context.

Nevertheless, here's a recipe:

Two Darwins Quantum Piety

"Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots [for it]." The Bible, Luke 23:34 [See also similar Matthew 27:35]

Thus is was that lots were cast at the most sacred event of the Christian religion, the Crucifixion [if it is not just a myth]. It was recorded because Fortuna wanted people to know that She does roll dice, both in the classical and quantum sense.